Saturday, April 22, 2006

George W. Bush is not the only American President to spread and exploit a pernicious myth: the moral superiority of the United States! Bollocks! Under Bush, our most publicized export has not been morality, freedom, or opportunity. It is, rather, torture, brutality, war crimes, perversion and moral –or, more precisely -immoral stench.

Clearly –American politicians have espoused and exploited this myth just as George W. Bush has capitalized on the idea that individual Americans are targeted by international terrorists who “…jest hate freedom”, terrorists willing to blow themselves up because we are more free and possess more material goods. I’m sorry –but having a three car garage and lots of cheap gasoline are not among my values. If that's what it means to be American, then I've been living in the wrong country since birth! I have nothing but contempt for anyone who's willing to turn a blind eye to torture in return for cheap gas which has, obviously, not been forthcoming despite Bush's many outrages to human decency.

And if George Bush were correct in believing that being free in America means having enough material wealth to waste resources in a Hummer, then I say we deserve our fate, a fate which has always been in our own hands –not the so-called “terrorists”. As Sartre said: "Man is nothing but what he makes of himself". That means that when you screw up, you've got no one to blame but yourself. Clearly, then, Bush is no existentialist! He continues to blame everyone but himself for the consequences of his evil intentions.

I submit to you that Bush’s war on terrorism is not merely a failure; it's as fraudulent as his wars against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. Because of Bush’s war on terrorism, America, a net debtor nation thanks to Ronald Reagan and the GOP, has –at last –found some exports: brutality, perversity and torture.

If there is any good news to be found in the slimy residue of Bush’s sorry mal-administration it is this: a revolt against Bush seems to be brewing at the CIA where many are said to live in fear of indictments and subpoenas that may be coming down any day now. What’s called “Wehrmacht group” inside the CIA are leaking the sordid details about how the Bush administration conducted a program of torture and perversion at Abu Ghraib and how the Bush administration is deliberately trying to skirt U.S. and international laws with a program of ongoing “rendition”, that is, flying victims to other countries for the purpose of torture and other crimes.

Racking someone is bad enough but torture American-style seems especially abhorrent and always colored by more than a soupcon of sexual perversity, Satanism, and psycho-sexual morbidness that defies description in any language. Semour Hersh says that the U.S. has video tapes of children being raped, sodomized, tortured at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

" Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

Reprehensible images to be found among unreleased photographs include images of rape, torture, mutilated animals, circles of candles, swastikas, and sexual activity among the torturers themselves, often in front of the detainees. [See: Sex Rituals of Abu Ghraib]

"A review of all the computer media submitted to this office revealed a total of 1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse, 93 video files of suspected detainee abuse, 660 images of adult pornography, 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees, 29 images of soldiers in simulated sexual acts, 20 images of a soldier with a Swastika drawn between his eyes, 37 images of Military Working dogs being used in abuse of detainees and 125 images of questionable acts."

It’s hard to believe that the entire torture program is anything other than an excuse by perverts to indulge in psycho-sexual and/or satanic rituals that might be more at home inside the walls of the Skull and Bones or the Nazi SS than in a legitimate program to elicit useful information in a “war on terrorism”. In fact, the “war on terrorism” itself, premised as it is upon lies and propaganda, seems to be but an excuse to indulge satanic perversity not seen since the Holocaust. As one blogger put it: “…it's right out of a dark occultist's playbook.” Indeed, it is. And who but a Bonesman could be its chief architect? Who but the man who set records for executions in Texas could create its policies? Who but the man who ridiculed death row inmates would defend the perverted rationale of torture? Who but someone who got his jollies blowing up horned toads in West Texas could defend it, encourage it, and, at the same time, deny it and cover it up?

This program of torture seems sure to create terrorists where none had been before. Yet, the Bush administration’s defense and active cover up of these atrocities bespeaks its complicity in heinous crimes against humanity. The only rational explanation is this: Bush needs new enemies to justify a permanent occupation.

Meanwhile, a report on U.S. interrogation tactics entitled “Human Rights Standards Applicable to the United States' Interrogation of Detainees,” challenges the various rationalizations cited inexplicably in defense of an act that had been denied by Bushies. Why defend an act that had not occurred? Scott Horton, a human rights activist has since cited various “torture memoranda” to disprove Rumsfeld's position that Abu Ghraib was but the work of a few “bad apples”. The reports by Seymour Hersh are consistent with Horton’s work; they tend to support the conclusion that Abu Ghraib is but one “island” in the American gulag archipelago. Torture is Bush’s policy and it will be his sorry legacy, a cancer on the American body politic, an indictment of the national morality, a final chapter in what Theodore Dreiser called "Tragic America".

There is cause for concern throughout the CIA. Despite fawning rationalizations by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, at least one FBI attorney had written that “rendition” is illegal. Indeed, international law speaks to the commission of the acts themselves, not the location. The Bush administration’s defense of a program that it contradictorily denies is irrelevant, a shallow, transparent dodge. Clearly — “rendition” is designed to circumvent American laws. It's consistent with Bush’s delusional mindset: he is above the laws and the rule of law does not apply to him. This is clearly psychotic and the doctrine of the "unitary executive" is just symptom of a very, very sick mind.

GENEVA (AP) - Some 15,000 detainees are being held in Iraq by government ministries in violation of Iraqi law, and nearly as many are being held by U.S.-led multinational forces, a senior U.N. official said Friday.

Only the country's justice ministry is permitted to hold detainees for longer than 72 hours, but Gianni Magazzeni, head of the U.N. Human Rights Office in Baghdad, said most Iraqi-held detainees are under the control of other government officials, naming Iraq's interior and defense ministries in particular.

``Those are still in the thousands and would be not in a situation which is in line with Iraqi law,'' he said at the U.N.'s European headquarters in Geneva. Magazzeni, who took over the post in mid-February, was visiting Geneva and said he was on his way back to Baghdad. It was unclear where Magazzeni obtained his figures for detainees held by the Iraqi government. ...

For more on the subject, see the Sex, Drugs, Mind Control and Torture index.More about how Bush's Iraq debacle is laced with stories of sadism and sexual perversion:

Sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent under Saddam Hussein, has resurfaced in Iraq. TIME reports on a seldom-discussed epidemic: girls being kidnapped and sold to brothels.

...

Safah is part of a seldom-discussed aspect of the epidemic of kidnappings in Iraq: sex trafficking. No one knows how many young women have been kidnapped and sold since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq, based in Baghdad, estimates from anecdotal evidence that more than 2,000 Iraqi women have gone missing in that period. ...

The CIA had evidence Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction six months before the 2003 US-led invasion but was ignored by a White House intent on ousting Saddam Hussein, a former senior CIA official said, according to CBS.

Tyler Drumheller, who headed CIA covert operations in Europe during the run-up to the Iraq war, said intelligence opposing administration claims of a WMD threat came from a top Iraqi official who provided the US spy agency with other credible information.

The source "told us that there were no active weapons of mass destruction programs," Drumheller said in a CBS interview to be aired on Sunday on the US network's 60 Minutes.

"The (White House) group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested," he was quoted as saying in interview excerpts released by CBS on Friday.

"We said: 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said: 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change'," added Drumheller, whose CIA operation was assigned the task of debriefing the Iraqi official.

He was the latest former US official to accuse the White House of setting an early course toward war in Iraq and ignoring intelligence that conflicted with its aim.

CBS said the CIA's intelligence source was former Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri and that former CIA Director George Tenet delivered the information personally to US President George W Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top White House officials in September 2002. They rebuffed the CIA three days later.

"The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy," the former CIA agent told CBS.

Stay tuned to the cowboy. I am researching an article about Bush Sr, who raised the specter of the mushroom cloud in his run up to the Persian Gulf War I. Simply put, wars of aggression are crimes against the peace. Atrocities in the act of carrying out such a war are war crimes. U.S. law prohibits such violations of Nuremburg —so don't let anyone tell you that Nuremberg doesn't matter. Read U.S. Codes; Section 2441. This is serious stuff, folks. Of course we're talking about violations of Nuremberg, but we're also talking about capital crimes under U.S. law!

Tom DeLay, that paragon of virtue who spearheaded that impeachment movement, is now the figurehead of the congressional moral shambles that started out as the dubious "Contract with America."

If an extramarital affair deserves a censure vote, what does the implosion of our rights of privacy guaranteed by the Constitution deserve?

President Bush promised the American people that he would fire anyone working in his administration who was involved in leaks. What a surprise. The order came from our President himself. Both of these acts, plus the lies perpetrated on the American people about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Gaffney, are called treason.

The ludicrousness of tax cuts for the rich (elite) while the country is at war is fiscally and morally reprehensible. It has left us without the ability to deal with education, Social Security, and is eroding our ability to give aid to the poor. It has also left us without the strength to stand up to the real enemies of this country, Iran and North Korea.

Finally, please do not equate this quagmire with World War II. We had a dictator who was well on his way to world domination, not a tin horn [dictator wannabe] firing a shotgun from a podium. ...

George W. Bush should do the ultimate patriotic act for America. He should resign.

He should give up this miserable, unpopular and tragic presidency and return to Texas. [my comment: he should be arrested for felony violations of U.S. Codes; Section 2441 and tried in a court of law. When found guilty, he should be sentenced!]

There, he can reflect on the lives he has cost in Iraq, the huge deficits he is accountable for, the Medicare drug program and Katrina recovery messes he so incompetently created, the illegal spying he has promoted, and the enormous waste of time and money he has spent going around the country telling his lies to friendly, hand-picked Republican audiences who are most certainly in denial about how pitiful he is.

Louisville-area folks can do their patriotic act this fall. They can dump Anne Northrup for her rubber-stamping support of Bush's reckless, dangerous and misguided policies. ...

Bush should not merely resign. This man is armed and dangerous, a threat to U.S. Democracy, a traitor, a mass murderer by proxy, an arch criminal.

Americans, increasingly, are not buying his justifications for any of these positions. Yet Bush has made no effort to persuade them that his actions are sound, prudent or productive; rather, he takes offense when anyone questions his unilateral powers. He responds as if personally insulted.

Friday, April 21, 2006

Bush would have you believe that "terrorism" is the greatest threat of the 21st century but that's according to Bush, Blair and the regime du jour in Israel. The fact is your chances of being killed by terrorists are tiny; your chances of getting killed while crossing any big city street in America is much higher. According to a United Nations report by Peter Heinlein, political violence has been dropping since the end of the cold war.

A report by the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center concedes that international terrorism has increased somewhat recently -but most of those incidents are linked to Kashmir. Has Bush ever proposed that we go to war with Kashmir? The Center's report concludes that terrorism is not the grave security threat that Bush and his GOP hangers-on would have you believe.

In America the biggest beneficiaries of terrorism have been incumbent regimes, primarily Reagan, Bush Sr. and now Bush Jr. Is this co-incidental? If you believe pigs fly.

Waging "War" on nations said to be supporting or nurturing "terrorists" is counterproductive -unless it is the purpose of demagogues (Bush and Reagan) to exploit terrorism for political purposes. James I of England used "terrorism" to rally Protestants following the gun powder plot. Guy Fawkes was executed for high treason but not until James I denounced the act of terrorism, declaring "We dinna need the Papists now!" In fact, the gun powder that was found in the Houses of Parliament was traced to the government's own stores of armaments. Inside job? Fawkes' alleged attempt to blow up Parliament came at a time of great disillusionment with the reign of James I, Elizabeth's successor.

A grasp on power based on war and/or terror will prove to be fleeting, fading when the danger is seen to have passed. Ronald Reagan, like Bush now, waged a great "war on terrorism". "You can run but you can't hide", Reagan boasted. But after two years there was absolutely nothing to show for this great GOP war! When the Marine Barracks in Lebanon was blown up, Reagan simply withdrew. In fact, FBI Stats compiled and published by the Brookings Institute prove conclusively that over the two years that Reagan waged his great war, terrorism increased very nearly exponentially. At the end of this counter-productive war, so called terrorist attacks on U.S interests decreased.

More recently, Bush Sr's attack on Saddam Hussein following the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait came a time when Senior's approval ratings were probably even lower than Junior's are now. See Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States".

Like Junior now, Bush Sr lied about his war against Iraq. Bush told the world that Hussein had developed a nuke. Where are those nukes? Where are those WMD? Where is a single truth told by any Bush at any time about anything?

At least one poll this week has Bush plunging into the 20's. What the polls don't measure is the level of outrage among those disapproving of Bush's performance. That will require a different methodology.

The recent polls may point to a sea change in American thinking, a major re-alignment that threatens what the GOP had hoped would be a permanent majority. Bush Sr was in the 20's ratings-wise when he decided to attack Iraq. John Sununnu boasted that Senior Bush's victory in Iraq would insure his re-election. But, it was not the war —as Carville would prove —it was the economy!

Bush Sr pioneered every tactic now employed by Shrub. It was not enough to get Pappa re-elected but it may very well be enough to get Junior indicted.

One would hope that at this point the nation will wake up! As I've said before: we would call a doctor an idiot who tells you to keep on doing whatever it is that's making you sick. Pappa's Bush and Ronald Reagan's failed experiments with fascism should have awakened this nation to the dangers. The back to back failures of these criminal administrations should have been warning enough. The GOP should already have been consigned to an ignominious history. What this nation needs is a party of the loyal opposition —not a party that schemes to set up a right wing, theocratic dictatorship.'Toons by Dante Lee; use only with permission

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

A civil war in Iraq overshadows yet another Bush failure: Afghanistan where the Taliban is reorganized and resurgent. The task of containing the "resurgency" has fallen to a force of some eleven thousand American servicemen who cannot be expected to prevent the Taliban from regaining power. Like the much bigger force in Iraq, American troop strength is completely inadequate for the job –a situation that has Rumsfeld’s finger prints all over it.

Bush, of course, paints a rosy picture of the situation in Afghanistan, calling his attack on that country an “…unqualified success.” But that’s not the picture that emerges from a recent report by the Council on Foreign Relations:

Council Special Report No. 12Afghanistan’s Uncertain Transition argues that Afghanistan is still far from stability. While the country has reestablished basic institutions of government, it has barely started to make them work. The government and its international supporters are challenged by a terrorist insurgency that has become more lethal and effective and that has bases in Pakistan, a drug trade that dominates the economy and corrupts the state, and pervasive poverty and insecurity.

Bush will have made terrorism worse. Nations that harbor terrorists, Bush told us, would be treated like the terrorists themselves. The question no one bothered to ask was simply this: just who are the terrorists and which nations harbor them? Any recent history of Saudi Arabia is highly suspicious and full of Bush family cronies —but instead of following those leads, the Bush administration worked to cover up its own connections with the Saudi royal family. Prominent Saudi royals were ushered out of the U.S. surreptitiously; the public, the media, the world was distracted by smoke and shattered glass if not smoke and mirrors. No one in the Bush administration has ever come forward with an innocent explanation. Anyone daring to question the official conspiracy theory is a traitor by Bush's convenient definition.

Since that time, numerous stories have surfaced about how Bush had planned to attack Iraq immediately but was dissuaded by Colin Powell. Afghanistan was offered up because it was said that the Taliban was harboring Osama Bin Laden –although no hard evidence against Bin Laden has surfaced since 1998.

The mentality in the White House seemed to be never let a good pretext to war go to waste. Whose ass got kicked seemed almost beside the point! An angry American populace wanted revenge, quick results, and easy victories. Bush was just the man to supply revenge but not results. And victories are yet to be attained at all.

Enough history. Fast forward to the dismal present, a time in which Bush has failed to subdue the civilian population against whom he has waged aggressive war upon a pack of lies –none of them having anything to do with righting the wrongs of 911. An increasing number of conservatives now denounce the bone headed decision to wage war on Iraq. As a quagmire, it surpasses Viet Nam. And unlike Viet Nam where blame could be equally dispersed among GOP and Democratic regimes alike, Iraq is a tar baby that is stuck to Bush’s foot and bush’s foot alone. Bush broke Iraq and since the attack his every action has made the quagmire worse.

Bush had promised a “Marshall Plan” to rebuild Afghanistan, the tiny country where he had hoped to grab an easy victory on the cheap. The defeat of the Taliban may have been cheap but the price of victory seems beyond the ability of the United States to obtain. $3 billion has been appropriated but this hardly amounts to a “Marshall Plan”. Of that amount, some $2.3 billion is sucked up by security and military items. What's left is earmarked for public relations, i.e. making Bush look good in an election year. In simpler times that might have fooled a nation of “poltroonish goosesteppers” –as H.L Mencken called his fellow Americans.

It doesn't matter than Karzai is a photogenic puppet. He has been called derisively the mayor of Kabul as war lords, bandits and drug dealers operate with impunity outside the city limits.

Nor can Bushies cite a draft constitution as evidence of success. A proposed charter fashioned under the guidance of the United States, is hardly a result that can be pointed to as evidence of “victory”. Rather, it celebrates religious intolerance and affirms Sunni supremacy even as Bush seems to be presiding over the rise of Shias in Iraq. Afghanistan, like Iraq, is most certainly worse off since the U.S. Attacked and invaded.

The Bush administration has learned nothing from the experience. Bush’s ham-fisted, NeoCon approach ignored common sense. At last, the NeoCon approach ignored J.S. Mill's admonition that tyranny by a majority is still tyranny. What has been said of the French Bourbons can be said of Bush: that his regime forgot nothing and learned nothing.

KABUL (Reuters) - Taliban guerrillas have attacked a U.S.-funded Afghan construction company, killing an Afghan guard and wounding two, the director of the company said on Sunday.

Police said that in a separate incident Taliban gunmen killed a senior government official in Ghazni province to the southwest of the capital, Kabul, on Sunday.

The attack on the construction company happened on Saturday night in Shah Wali Kot district of Kandahar province, where four Canadian soldiers had been killed by a roadside bomb earlier in the day.

The firm targeted, Tawazo Construction Company, is building a road linking the southern province of Kandahar with neighboring Uruzgan province -- a U.S. government-funded project.

"The Taliban opened fire at the company's guards, killing one and wounding two others before setting ablaze 14 vehicles and fleeing," company director Mohammad Yousuf told Reuters.

Southern Afghanistan has seen rising violence since the Taliban announced last month they had launched a spring offensive.

Ousted from power by U.S. and Afghan opposition forces in late 2001, the Taliban have declared a war on President Hamid Karzai's Western-backed government, foreign troops in the country, and anyone supporting it, including aid workers. ...

Sunday, April 16, 2006

George Will has made the best case for not nuking Iran. On ABC "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, Will said that Iran is a young society, connected to the internet, cell phone savvy, independent and aware of what’s going on throughout the world. The Mullahs, George says, cannot rule this emerging open society. Regime change will take place from within. Have conservatives re-discovered long atrophied brains —or have mainstream conservatives broken forever with NeoCons?

What might have been the case if this kind of progressive thinking had been practiced by “conservatives” before the long campaign of Saddam demonization? What if the so-called free world had not radicalized Iraqi theocrats with years of sanctions, lies, and bluster? What if the world’s most powerful Democracy had had the courage of its convictions? What if leaders of the United States had really believed in Democracy?

George Bush’s NeoCon base had best pay attention to George Will. Leaving Iran alone is, in fact, Bush’s only realistic option. There is no reason to believe that U.S. intelligence about Iran is in any way better than intelligence about Iraq. There is also no reason to believe anything said by Bush. And, at last, a bombing campaign –nukes or no –is unlikely to have any effect on Iran’s nuclear capability.

But, according to the Washington Post, reason, sanity and common sense have not prevailed in the Bush administion. The Post reports that despite Bush’s denials, the Pentagon is proceding apace with plans to attack Iran:

It's important to talk about war planning that's real. And it is for Iran. In early 2003, even as U.S. forces were on the brink of war with Iraq, the Army had already begun conducting an analysis for a full-scale war with Iran. The analysis, called TIRANNT, for "theater Iran near term," was coupled with a mock scenario for a Marine Corps invasion and a simulation of the Iranian missile force. U.S. and British planners conducted a Caspian Sea war game around the same time. And Bush directed the U.S. Strategic Command to draw up a global strike war plan for an attack against Iranian weapons of mass de struction. All of this will ultimately feed into a new war plan for "major combat operations" against Iran that military sources confirm now exists in draft form.

There is no upside gain, only painful blowback. As Will accurately pointed out, despite Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric, the Iranian populace is overwhelmingly pro-western. Bush’s loud mouth has already undone much of that good will. A bombing campaign will most certainly turn a pro-western nation into sworn enemies. A nuclear strike, in particular, will radicalize the entire population.

Already, the U.S. Invasion of Iraq has set the stage for an Iran/Shi’ite alliance. Pledging to smash the “Axis of Evil”, Bush has, rather, created the conditions for a real “Axis of Evil”. An attack on Iran will only strengthen the rule of the Mullahs who will most certainly form an alliance with the religious majority in Iraq.

Proposals to use nukes on Iran are psychotic. But we have become accustomed to hearing about vainglorious adventures from a demagogue who lied this nation into misadventure and quagmire in Iraq. On a national scale, however, nuke talk smacks of an intoxication with imperial power. That any such thing is considered seriously by some people is evidence that nothing has been learned from the debacle in Iraq. You would call a doctor an idiot who tells you to keep on doing whatever it is that’s making you sick. Why are not “Presidents’ held to the same standard?

In the meantime, Congressman Peter DeFazio has reminded the Bush administration that any strike against Iran must be authorized by Congress, presumably in the form of a Declaration of War. Bush is not likely to get one. Therefore, any campaign against Iran will be illegal –just as was the bombing and attack on Iraq. Moreover, Iran is within the letter of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Any attack against Iran would clearly be a violation of Nuremberg Principles, insisted upon by the United States itself. Such an attack would be a prosecutable crime against the peace.'Toons by Dante Lee; use only with permission